OPEN 2

HUMOUR ME
Nigel Marsh, Chairman,
The Leading Edge
...
I’m the wrong person to ask about Out-of-
Home (OOH) advertising. I’m utterly biased.
Ever since I moved to London at the
start of my career I was smitten by the clever
posters I would walk past on my way to work.
Far from viewing OOH as visual pollution,
I thought it made the cityscape nicer (a view
rather dramatically reinforced and solidified
by a trip behind the Berlin Wall that winter).
The moment I saw the famous ‘I never read The
Economist. (Management trainee. Aged 42.)’
poster, I made a decision that I wanted
to work at the agency responsible for creating it.
Twelve months and a series of happy accidents
later, I was indeed lucky enough to turn up for
my first day of employment at said agency
– AMV BBDO.
Looking back, I didn’t realise how lucky
I was. For eight years I watched some of the
most famous and effective poster advertising
ever seen being written, sold and produced.
The Economist campaign defied all expectations
and continued to raise the bar: most memorably
on one occasion turning the tops of London
double-decker buses into giant 48-sheet posters
with the headline, ‘Hello to our readers in
high office’; on another producing a billboard
campaign that consisted purely of a blank red
poster with a small model of a fly stuck on the
top right-hand corner – no headline, no logo.
Amazing ground-breaking stuff. And boy was
it effective.
We broke all the rules and produced a car
campaign for Volvo that didn’t have any cars
in it, just the line, ‘Cages save lives’ above
pictures of scenarios such as a diver in a cage
being attacked by a great white, with the Volvo
logo below.
Of course, it wasn’t just AMV BBDO
leading the charge. There were a number of
agencies doing amazing poster campaigns at
the same time – everyone trying to out-do each
other; indeed, my all-time favourite poster
came from a competitor. It was for the new
Volkswagen Polo. Far from having no cars
in it, it was simply a huge pack shot of the new
model with the headline, ‘The New Volkswagen
Polo’ and underneath, next to the logo, a small
byline, “We never said the old one was perfect.”
Brilliant. Such confidence. And humour. And
simplicity. So perfectly on-brand, understated,
and appealingly humble. You can just imagine
all the reasons NOT to do that poster: “Ooh
be careful! You’re criticising the company!”
or “You’ll upset all our customers who have
bought a previous model” etc. Of course, back
in the real world, no one was upset, everyone
got it and felt all the more fondly of Volkswagen
as a result.
My love of good posters has its
downsides. I can’t see a bad one without
feeling a desire to call up the client and explain
where they’re going wrong. My wife rightly
points out that it’s got nothing to do with me
but I just can’t help myself. Someone should
have told them that their art direction is too
fussy and the copy too small to read standing
five feet away, let alone from a passing car. Or
that their agency has committed the cardinal
sin (in my eyes) of the ‘irrelevant attention
grab’, any idiot can get your attention (naked
body, dead body, swear word, etc). It’s doing
it in a branded, compelling, relevant way that
takes skill. And art, if I’m being totally honest.
I believe good posters are art. And I’m not just
talking about the stuff that Toulouse-Lautrec
and his contemporaries produced in France
in the late 1890s. I’m talking about the stuff
produced now.
But does it work? Well, one of the utter
joys of my role here at The Leading Edge is that
I have been exposed to decades of research
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